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My late husband had no religious feeling whatsoever, although at times in his youth he tried sincerely to muster some. At boarding school, he sang Episcopal hymns and recited prayers, closing his eyes and doing his utmost to feel some divine presence. Nope. Nothing. By the time I met him, when he was in his fifties, he couldn’t have cared less. He was utterly non-spiritual, the most completely secular person I’ve known, so even to me it seems vaguely suspect that it’s because of him that I now believe there may be an afterlife, a place I guess I would call Heaven. I believe in this afterlife—his, at least—because of the smooth fox terriers.

Roger Angell had loved smooth fox terriers since the afternoon, five or six decades ago, when he and his second wife Carol, on vacation in France, saw one prancing along a gleaming Mediterranean beach behind a strikingly beautiful woman wearing nothing but a bikini bottom. The image stuck in his mind, but Roger insisted he had eyes only for the dog. Upon returning to the States, he found a breeder in Vermont and bought a puppy; years later, after that one died, he and Carol bought another. Andy was their third.

In 2012, when Andy and I met, he was only two, thrilled to make anyone’s acquaintance. Roger was ninety-two, grieving and undoubtedly frightened. He’d lost Carol to breast cancer, which had returned unexpectedly in her early seventies. His anguish was not hard to imagine, at least for me, a widow, but he also suffered from a lack of domestic skills. He was good at so many things—driving, sailing, finding just the right gift for a loved one—but I’m not sure he knew the washing machine from the dryer. He could feed Andy, but, except for pouring cornflakes into a bowl and slicing a banana, he could not feed himself. One especially thoughtful friend brought him a sheaf of menus from neighborhood restaurants that would deliver.

I was uncharacteristically petless that year. My daughter’s childhood dog, Pearl, and our last cat, Moe, had both recently passed away, and I was practicing positive thinking: I’ll travel, now that I’m free. But, when I went over to Roger’s apartment to bring him a roast chicken, Andy came to the door, wagging and welcoming. I unwrapped the chicken enough to tear off a chunk for him, and then I asked Roger to marry me. He said no, but not as firmly as he might have. He may have divined, in me, a solution to the daily challenges that plagued him, but he couldn’t help hoping that a younger candidate would turn up. After all, I was sixty-four, and his previous two brides had been in their early twenties.

Roger and Carol had both worked and always hired dog walkers during the day, but Roger took Andy around the block for the last walk of the night. A smooth fox terrier is small, but vividly black-and-white, even after dark. The doormen on East Ninetieth Street looked out for Roger and Andy. Roger did not easily strike up conversations with strangers, but he and Joseph Chiffriller, a writer and a baseball fan who was often on night duty at a building on Park Avenue, became friends. The first time I took Andy out for his evening walk, I was stopped repeatedly and asked about Roger, and Joseph eyed me skeptically coming and going. The doormen were a tough crowd; I thought it might be a long while before they trusted me, not just with Andy but also with Roger.

I wasn’t worried—I knew my heart was in the right place—but it seemed to take forever to bring everyone else, including Roger, around to my point of view. We didn’t marry until the summer of 2014, by which time Andy and I were a bonded pair, as Petfinder describes animals that cannot be separated from each other.

Roger and I were both still working, and we had family hither and yon, but Andy was the center of our days. We often took him out together on weekends, meeting and greeting various dog friends in the neighborhood. One afternoon, we ran into a black-and-white Shih Tzu at Engineers’ Gate, on our way into Central Park, and Roger called out, “Look! He’s wearing the team colors!” He bent down to scratch the dog’s fluffy topknot, and then he introduced him to Andy: “Tumble Gently? Meet Dry Flat.”

Another time, we passed a toddler in a stroller who pointed at Andy and asked his mother, “Cow?” His mother, who realized immediately that it was just a question of scale, thought for only a second before explaining, “No—Harry.”

Roger was beside himself with delight. “Harry the Dirty Dog” was one of his favorite children’s books. “That was the most purely literary conversation I’ve ever heard!” he said. “In three words!” He became quiet, and I knew he was thinking of his and Carol’s second fox terrier, who was also named Harry—for President Truman, not the dog in the book.

We were not always in perfect harmony where Andy was concerned. One night, when I came in from taking Andy around the block, I told Roger about a hostile dog we’d run into on the corner. I threw the leash on the hall table and stomped into the living room. I was outraged: “Andy was being so nice to him, and then the dog just attacked him!”

Roger was reading, but he looked up for a second. Andy hopped onto a nearby settee and wagged his tail. If Andy was fine, Roger was fine. He shrugged and went back to his book. “Yeah,” he said. “That happened to Gandhi a lot.”

A week later, we were watching the Westminster Dog Show on television when I said the smooth fox terrier was so cute. Roger snapped, “The fox terrier is not cute! The fox terrier is dashing!” Westminster, where members of the breed had won Best in Show four years in a row in the early twentieth century, was always a disappointment in the twenty-first. Roger especially hated a line the announcers used year after year as the terrier class paraded into Madison Square Garden: “And here comes the smooth fox terrier, with its easy-care coat.”

“That’s the best you can do?” he’d shout at the TV. “Easy-care coat?” This happened annually, on cue. If Westminster was in town, I’d make Roger’s evening Scotch-and-water a little stronger than usual.

We would occasionally take Andy for a drive in Roger’s old but noble 1997 Volvo wagon, which I’d fetch from a garage in Harlem where we stored it. We’d go across the George Washington Bridge and then up the Palisades to Snedens Landing, where Roger had spent summers as a small child and later lived with his first wife, Evelyn. There was an ancient cemetery nearby, where a couple of forebears of his were buried, and we would wander around looking at inscriptions on the headstones while Andy sniffed them. One darkening fall afternoon, we returned to Manhattan to find a parking spot right in front of our apartment building. “Miracle on Madison Avenue,” he said.

It was good only for an hour, so I said I’d just let them out and take the car back, but Roger said no. “Come up with us in the elevator, and don’t leave until after Andy and I are settled in the apartment,” he said. “If you get back in the car now and disappear, it’ll break his heart.”

When, a few years later, Roger’s own heart began to break, Andy and I lay in bed with him and listened to audiobooks, or I read headlines from the Times, a favorite poem, or an old, familiar short story—there were so many that Roger loved, it was easy. A couple of times, Roger took both my hands in his and looked me in the eye—an earnest, uncharacteristic gesture that startled me and brought me to attention—and said he was so, so, so sorry that Andy was old, too. He was consoling me, in advance, not for his own imminent death but for Andy’s eventual one.

I argued with him. Andy wasn’t old. He spent every morning racing around the Park after squirrels, or retrieving balls thrown by his best friend, Keeper, a great, handsome mutt whose hip problems made him unable to keep up on long walks. Keeper was a pretty good pitcher, though—he used his teeth and tossed his head. Andy would retrieve the slobbery ball and place it between Keeper’s front paws for the next throw. “Gives new meaning to the term ‘spitball,’ ” Roger said.

But Roger knew. He just looked at me pityingly, insisting again and again, as if I might not believe him, “I will love you forever.” I think he did; I think he does.

I know that losing someone who was four months from his hundred-and-second birthday shouldn’t have been a shock, but it was. Roger was still so much fun, still so avid—more alive than I was, really, after a couple of hard pandemic years. You read about people who live to a hundred and five, a hundred and seven, even longer. I expected him to be one of them, and I still don’t understand why he wasn’t.

He died in May, 2022, and afterward Andy and I were both constantly sick. In July, I developed pericarditis and pneumonia, and in the fall Andy was diagnosed with metastatic cancer. I caught COVID in late October and couldn’t shake it for nearly a month, and Andy died in November after a precipitous decline.

I was desolate, and my desolation showed. The pandemic had made loneliness epidemic, but mine must have looked especially desperate, because almost immediately a couple of people asked me if I’d thought of dating. Dating. Anyway, no. Also, what kind of man would I look for? Surprise me.

One time early in our marriage, when I had flown to Virginia to visit my sister, Sally, in her nursing home, I’d found a dog running along a rural highway. He had to have been lost. There were no houses for miles—nothing but woods. I happened to have mozzarella sticks with me, so it wasn’t hard to lure him into the rental car. He ate a few and then curled up and fell asleep on the seat next to me. He stank to high heaven. He was a basset-beagle mix, and he’d been on the loose long enough that his fleas no longer bothered to hide. I dropped him off at a no-kill shelter and told them that, if they couldn’t find his owner, I would drive back down and adopt him myself. Back in New York, I told Roger all this, and there was no mistaking my seriousness: if this dog needed a home, I was going to bring him to ours.

Roger raised his eyebrows and seemed to stare into space. I steeled myself for an argument, but when he finally spoke what he said was, “What should we name him?”

The dog did need a home, but, by the time he was made available for adoption, several families in Virginia were vying for him, so I told the shelter to choose one. But I never forgot Roger’s eager, exemplary, completely surprising question. I understand that every marriage has its flaws and longueurs, but this was the kind of nonpareil moment that lets you know you’ve chosen well.

After losing Roger and Andy, I couldn’t imagine any solace. That winter, I went to Sarasota, where Roger and I had spent months during the pandemic and, in other years, had alternated between Orioles and Pirates spring-training games. Roger and Andy were well liked in the neighborhood, and it was excruciating to be there without them, without my boys. I had been depressed at other times in my life, but I had no experience with this level of loneliness. One sleepless night I did consider suicide, but I hadn’t cleaned out the attic of a house I own in the Catskills, so that was out of the question. Instead, I went online and searched for a dog. I typed in my requirements: middle-aged, small enough for me to pick up, good with children.

The dog I found was Sacha: six years old, seventeen pounds, and much loved by the grandchildren of the couple who owned her, who bred smooth fox terriers in Apopka, Florida, near Orlando. I took Sacha sight unseen. In a long life of dogs and cats, my first perfect pet had been Andy, so I wasn’t expecting another, but ask me anything about Sacha: Housebroken? Good with other dogs? Respectful of cats? Patient with toddlers? Sweet and calm with large, uncontrollable puppies? Peaceful when left alone? Cheerful, curious, funny? Yes, to all of it. Tasha, as I came to call her, was my second perfect dog. She saved me, and I loved her completely.

Last November 16th, I posted a picture on Facebook of Tasha for her ninth birthday. On December 1st, without warning, she died of internal bleeding caused by an undiagnosed cancer. She’d been especially happy that day, because her dog friend Staar was back from Thanksgiving. She had leaped and played and raced around Riverside Park and eaten a big breakfast when we came back home. She was fine all day and ate a good dinner. In the middle of the night, though, I woke up and knew something was not right. By four in the morning, she had died at the animal hospital, despite their urgent efforts to save her.

I was alone again, in much the same shocking way I had been three years earlier. My daughter, Emma, and her spouse, Kim, brought their dog over every evening that week. We would talk and have dinner together, and the three of them did everything they could to comfort me, but my days were horribly empty. The Health app on my phone reported that I had stopped walking, but I was not about to go out. People on the street, neighbors in the building, and children on their way to school would all want to know where Tasha was, and I knew I would cry if I had to tell them, and some of them would cry, too. So, no.

I had kept in touch with the breeder in Apopka, Susan, and I forced myself to tell her about Tasha’s death, because I knew she would notice the sudden absence of texted photographs. Susan wrote back to say that one of Tasha’s puppies had been retired from breeding after turning five, and, if I wanted to, I could pick her up in Apopka after the holidays. On January 6th, I took the Auto Train to Orlando, and the next morning I picked up my third—and last—smooth fox terrier, Nova. Once again, the dog of my dreams is trotting along beside me, and nagging thoughts about the miraculous nature of unexpected blessings keep me up at night.

I have never told anyone—especially Roger—that I feel his presence in these extraordinary circumstances, but maybe I should, because it does make a weird kind of sense. He had an uncanny ability to adapt, and it would be just his style to find himself in some sort of unexpected paradise—Wow! Look at this place!—especially one where he has serious dog-granting powers.

There is only one minor problem. Emma and Kim’s dog, who stays with me from time to time, is also named Nova (for lox, not an exploding star). All December, I thought about how the name of this second Nova might evolve into some concordant, vowel-sensitive variation—Lola, Nora, Nonna, Dona, Donna? I would give anything to let Roger decide.

So I keep thinking, Can’t we just talk? We could discuss Nova’s name, or maybe speak about serious loss in some roundabout way—Pete Alonzo leaving the Mets, say. If Roger didn’t want to admit that he was wrong about the afterlife, I wouldn’t press him, of course, but if he is my benefactor, somehow sending Tasha and now Nova to me, each at the moment of my greatest need, I so want to thank him, from the bottom of my heart—not only for the smooth fox terriers but also for keeping me in mind. If he does, I mean. If he is. ♦

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Mary Gaitskill reads her story “Something Familiar,” from the March 2, 2026, issue of the magazine. Gaitskill is the author of eight books of fiction, including “Veronica,” which was a finalist for a National Book Award in 2005, and the novella “This Is Pleasure.” Her most recent book is the essay collection “Oppositions.”

In your story “Something Familiar,” a woman returns to New York City, after decades in California, and has an unusual conversation with the driver of her cab from the airport, which pulls up memories from her past. How did the setup for the story come to you?

It was purely intuitive. I had the idea for the story but didn’t know how to enter into it. I literally went to bed thinking, Great story, but how to enter into it? The next morning, I thought of a chance encounter on a taxi ride. Possibly, I was subliminally influenced by a faint memory of the movie “Taxi Driver”? It’s been a long time since I’ve seen it, but it’s possible.

Both of the characters have had difficult times in their lives, and both have achieved a level of stability that may have been hard to imagine when they were younger. When the woman was young and trying to make it as a magazine writer, she and her best friend sometimes resorted to prostitution in order to pay rent. Her feelings about it at the time are more lighthearted than one would expect: “It seemed of a piece with the pleasing artifice of clubs and magazines, an almost comical piece, more real and more absurd than dating.” Does she still see it the same way from late middle age?

Basically, yes. (Though there would also be a layer of bewilderment that she voices to herself: What were we even doing there?) It may seem a strange attitude, but that would really depend on what her dating life was like! At one point, she thinks that it was “safer, actually, on an emotional level; none of the men she met there could really hurt her.” That is quite a revealing statement.

She felt that choosing that path was an act of defiance and feminine strength—that she was able to take what she’d been told “was the most shameful and despised thing” and make something beautiful out of it. But was she unusual in not having been coerced into that situation, in being able to choose if and when she wanted to do this, in being able to quit when she decided to?

I don’t know how unusual she is in being able to choose. I doubt there is any data on that. Certainly, a lot of women are coerced, and also there’s a more subtle thing that can happen, where someone might go into it thinking it’s temporary and get drawn in deeper than she intended. But I do think that a lot of women were/are like my character, especially in a city like New York, which is so expensive and so anonymous and, at least in the eighties, so hypersexual and open to whatever. She has an advantage in that there’s something else she may succeed at and eventually does; if she hadn’t, the outcome might have been different.

But, to address the “defiance” idea, I don’t think that is the reason she does it; she really is compelled by economic need, albeit sporadically so. She can’t pay her rent with what she’s making as an editorial assistant (this is realistic, or was in the eighties), and she’s been fired from a long list of part-time jobs. The element of defiance adds a certain semi-appealing flavor to the choice. It’s hard to describe exactly what I mean by this. I even hesitated to include those thoughts in the story, because they are shorthand for something pretty complicated and deep, even if the character expresses it in a way that sounds trivial. I remember this feeling being very much in the air in the eighties—not in relation to prostitution, in particular, but when it came to rejecting, or at least disrespecting, the received ideas about sexual morality. It would have been very natural for a generation coming of age during the Playboy (magazine) era to question society’s view of prostitution. My father was a very, very straitlaced person, and yet he had a subscription to that magazine, in which prostitutes were regularly portrayed as (1) stupid and degraded; (2) beautiful and adored; and (3) desirable in either case. This is a very confusing message for a girl to absorb, and one that was reflected in other aspects of culture, too, if less starkly. It was a contradiction that lent itself to a kind of romance and curiosity: Why are these women so desired yet so despised, so powerful yet polluted and pitiable? How are they different from other women? Or are they? You can see that fascination and romance in the prostitute characters of Dostoyevsky, Dickens, and Zola, not to mention countless fifties paperback potboilers. (My dad had tons of those, too.) Even in the Bible, whores show up as ambivalent figures. So, yeah, my character would have absorbed all of that.

The driver has been violent toward women in the past and has regrets about that. The woman regrets having hurt the feelings of a john who wanted to ask her out. They both seem more haunted by the damage they’ve done to others than they are by their own damage. Why do you think that is? Is it survivor’s guilt?

She’s focussed on this memory because it has naturally come up: the taxi-driver reminds her of a very dramatic instance in which an action of hers had consequences for others. She considers her effect on the man to have been deeper than what we usually mean by “hurt feelings”—she takes it seriously, precisely because of her own experience of damage. If her driver that night had reminded her of someone who had hurt her, she would likely have had a lot of feelings about that as well. As for the driver, I think he is haunted by damage to himself: he’s still hurt that his dad called him Lumpy McFatface! He feels ill-treated by his wife and his son, and by women generally, as his dream shows. He basically feels unloved, and perhaps he actually is. However, he’s also, in some murky way, aware that the damage he’s inflicted—abusing his wife, emotionally injuring his son, terrorizing a random woman—is much worse than what was done to him. He feels it so painfully that he can tolerate real remorse only in connection with his dreams. Also, both characters are well into the second half of their lives. I think it’s natural at that point to reckon with your own regrets.

Almost the entire story takes place during the late-night cab ride. Is there something about travel—the suspension between places—that allows the characters’ unusually intimate conversation to happen?

Yes, definitely. Travel can create a brief space where normal social constraints are suspended and people will speak more deeply to strangers than they would to people they know. I’ve had unusual conversations with people during taxi rides or on trains and planes—though this was more likely to happen in the past. Now people are staring at screens or talking on their phones.

The first two-thirds or so of the story are told from the woman’s perspective. For the last third, we alternate between her thoughts and the driver’s. Why did you decide to make that leap into his mind? Was one of the characters easier to inhabit than the other?

I really had to transition to him. The story would not have had enough meaning without his point of view. She was naturally easier for me, because she’s closer to me in age, gender, and experience. Still, I felt I could be with him in a basic human way; he’s a human struggling with emotional pain. Mostly, I was worried about condescending to him. I really hope I didn’t. ♦

She arrived at J.F.K. just past midnight after a four-hour flight delay. Her mind was blurry and her heart felt like a deep crater with something lurking at the bottom of it. It was her first trip to New York in more than a decade. She had come back to attend a memorial for a formerly close friend, Carley, with whom she had shared a life that was now alien to her.

Though the airport was well appointed and maintained, it appeared nonetheless on the ragged edge. Barely present workers dragged garbage bins, arranged displays of crappy snacks, and wiped counters with slow, heavy movements. Travellers sat slumped staring at phones or snoozed under their coats. It took forever for the bags to roll onto the relentlessly coruscating belt. In large cities, she preferred old-school taxis to apps, and at least the line was short; the driver energetically swung her bag into the trunk with his large arm and welcomed her to New York.

He was a big man who looked to be about sixty, comfortably rooted in his station of muscle and fat. His sloped shoulders suggested bodily power that was sleepy and sly; his large head and dark, badly cut hair amplified the weight and solidity of him, but his lips were sensitive and a little slack, as if yearning for something he’d been long deprived of.

She noticed all of this in a flash; she had developed the habit of fast, detailed observation in her previous life, when her ability to read someone’s physical affect helped her to know if she was safe with that person. Or not.

Also noticed: he had what she guessed was a St. Christopher medal hanging from the rearview; he didn’t use a G.P.S.

When she remarked on the latter, he said, “I’ve lived here all my life. I’ve been driving for nearly thirty years, on and off. I don’t need a machine to tell me anything.”

He spoke with a Queens accent and a blurting boyish delivery that, somewhere in her, rang some muffled bell. She smiled and said, “That’s great.”

He nodded into the mirror, showing his eyes. “Better to use my brain,” he said. “I know things the machine doesn’t know.” She murmured in agreement, then entered the hotel address on her phone just in case.

Moving faster now, they drove into a maze of monstrous complexes and overpasses—through chaotic fields of battered trailers, snarled fencing, jumbles of orange traffic cones and barrels, concrete berms, puzzling sites of stunned obsolescence, structures that could not remember what they had been for—then onto the highway, that zone of signage and speed which felt to her like a suspension of place and time.

“So, where’d you fly in from?” he asked.

“The Bay Area,” she said. “Marin County.”

Again, he showed his eyes in the mirror and said, “Where’s that?”

“Near San Francisco. Kind of like a suburb?”

“Oh,” he said. “That’s cool. At least you’re not in San Francisco. It sounds like a war zone—with all the crazy homeless people and drugs . . .”

“I wouldn’t call it a war zone. Yeah, there’s homeless people, but mostly they’re not going to bother you. You just have to pay attention to what’s around you.”

He nodded, his big head canted subtly toward her. “I get it. Same here in places. But it sounds worse there.” He glanced in the mirror again, as if assessing her.

“I’m not sure,” she said. “I used to live here, for, like, twenty years. It was back in the eighties. There were a lot of drugs and homeless people.”

“Yeah,” he said, “it was bad then. Giuliani really cleaned it up, but of course he’s gone.” Eyes in the mirror: “But you’re not from here.”

“No. I moved here from Kentucky.”

“That’s a big move! Why’d you come here?”

“To . . . I guess to make it. To do something I couldn’t do in Kentucky.”

“What?” His voice nice, a little teasing. “What did you do?”

What did she do? Her past appeared before her in rushed images, like a low-budget music video from the eighties. The camera of memory panned over random smiling faces, bright and young in the darkness, spangled with jewelry and gaudy makeup; people walking in a trance of fantasy, of glamour, haughty and dressed in cheap clothes tricked up to look . . . to look like . . . the dancing, snatches of music, joyful melancholy. She felt it deeply, like a drug:

And I try to get through
And I try to talk to you
But there’s something stopping me from getting through

There had been a lot of drugs, free, or almost free. She remembered somebody had once offered to give her and Carley coke if they would just pull up their shirts and kiss each other, so they did, holding hands, laughing, crossing a threshold together, dancing to her favorite song: “Nowhere girl, you’re living in a dream . . .”

“I wanted to write for magazines,” she said. “Women’s magazines, the fun ones, the fashion ones that also did real articles.”

“Oh,” he said, and his voice approved. Again she heard that subtle bell. “How did that work out?”

“It was hard, really hard. When I finally got a job, it was an assistant position that didn’t pay enough to live on. I had to do other work, too.”

He nodded vigorously. “That’s how it goes when you’re starting out,” he said. “I’ve done a lot myself. Worked in a print shop, a garage, delivered newspapers for a while. I liked driving a cab the best because of the independence—my dad used to drive, and when he retired he passed his medallion to me, so I’m free and clear. I could cash it in and retire anytime. But I like to keep active. And I like meeting people—some people.”

“I did a lot of things, too,” she said.

Nude art model (poorly paid), waitress (she got fired), hostess (she wasn’t charming enough), whore (bingo). That was another threshold she’d crossed with Carley; they had both started at the same place, a “house,” rather than outcall, which they’d agreed was too dangerous. They did it on an emergency basis, off and on for maybe five years. Neither took it seriously; it seemed of a piece with the pleasing artifice of clubs and magazines, an almost comical piece, more real and more absurd than dating. And safer, actually, on an emotional level; none of the men she met there could really hurt her.

“So did you do what you wanted? Did you write for the magazines?”

“Yeah,” she said. “Eventually, I worked my way up. It was fun for a while. I even interviewed some movie stars, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Sharon Stone—”

“Wow!”

Once they were rooted enough in their “real” lives—the magazine work for her, and some fiction publications in small magazines for Carley—they stopped “tricking.” It was an oddly nostalgic bond between them, but they rarely spoke of it in the increasing distance of their adult years, when their exchanges were naturally given over to news of marriages, births, careers that surged and subsided like love, and illnesses and losses communicated first by phone, then in texts, and finally via public posts. But the night before she boarded the plane she had dreamed of that time: there was a secret passage between the brightly lit cubicles and frenetic layout boards of some composite editorial office that was also a bar, and a warren of bedrooms where naked men lay expectantly—a passage she traversed with shy exuberance, holding a plastic cup of liquor from the office/bar.

“You don’t even have an accent,” he said.

“What?” She blinked as light from somewhere streamed disorientingly across her face.

“A Southern accent. You said Kentucky?”

“Oh, yeah. People don’t really have that kind of accent in Louisville. It’s a cosmopolitan city.”

“Too bad,” he said. “I like it when people sound like where they’re from. Some people from Queens try to sound like they’re not from there, but I’d never do that. If anything, I’m proud of it.”

“You should be,” she said, insincerely and yet with genuine feeling for his pride. Plus the persistent ping of something familiar—what was it? She looked out the window at the landscape just visible beyond the sound barriers: tenaciously squatting homes, vast, anonymous complexes, self-storage, auto-body-repair shops, and decrepit strip malls, hotels, and billboards, one of which jarringly declared “I Was Hurt In NYC.” Oh, she thought. Of course. Of course. That guy. Same build, Queens accent, probably Italian. He’d been young, much younger than the usual client—younger even than she was, almost a boy. He was big, strong, and crudely put together, with a layer of sensual fat that softened his muscularity and gave his size a vulnerable aspect. He had a huge erection but he kept saying that he didn’t want sex. He wanted to respect her. He wanted to take her out as a girlfriend. “No,” she said. “I can’t do that.”

“So what do you do now?” the driver asked. “You married, you have kids?”

“I’m retired. I’m married, but we don’t have kids. I married late.” He was silent a long beat. She asked, “What about you?”

“I’m the opposite. I have two kids, but to be honest I can’t say I really have a wife. I’m legally still married, but . . . I don’t even know where she is. For years now. I love my kids, though. They turned out fantastic. Worth all the . . . mess.”

“That sounds hard.”

“It wasn’t just hard. It was tragic.”

“Stop! You can’t really want a date with a . . . you know. This isn’t the place to ask a girl out!”

“Yeah, I know! But you don’t gotta be a ‘you know.’ As soon as I saw you, I thought, She doesn’t belong here. I’d like to talk to her, go out.”

“Thank you,” she said. “But—”

“Give me a chance. I won’t treat you like a whore. I’ll be good to you, I promise.”

“If I met you some other way it would be different,” she lied. “But—”

“It was love at first sight. At least for me. She seemed so sweet! But, for her, it was just about a green card.”

“Where did you meet her?”

“At my brother’s wedding. She was working behind the drinks table, pouring the wine. But she was the most beautiful woman there. Dominican, just got here. Full of beans and vinegar. I stood there and talked to her all night. She didn’t have much English, but it didn’t matter.”

They entered a tunnel—she didn’t remember which one—heavy and deep but also bright and hypnotic with its symmetry of shapes, a dreamish blur of lights, green, blue, white, sudden feverish red, its lulling sound distortion, natural comb filtering that subtly affected the muscles of her heart: some frequencies amplified, others cancelled out.

“Are you scared of me? Don’t be. I’m not a bad guy. I don’t want just sex. I want something real.”

“Why did you come here, then?”

Or maybe she hadn’t said that. She didn’t remember what she’d said, only that it had gone on for the whole hour, and that he’d said, “I’m lonely,” and “Please,” and “Give me a chance.” And that, in the end, she’d given him a fake number and yet another fake name. Why had she done that? Maybe because she’d held him and tried to comfort him and, after that, it was impossible not to enter more deeply into the pretend.

“Mama Bear and Baby Bear have flipped.”

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“She turned out to be not so sweet. We both had tempers and we fought too much. And then she developed a drinking problem—I mean, bottles hidden under the sink, sloppy in front of the kids, burnt dinner, no dinner. Even worse things.” He shook his head. “Disgusting.”

Had she said, “I’m lonely, too”? She might have. It would have been her idea of nice. It would also have been true.

“Finally I threw her out. Told her she could come back when she cleaned up. And she did, but then the drinking started again, rinse, repeat. Thank God for my sisters—they helped me raise the kids. Thank God for the kids.”

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“Why? It’s not your fault.”

At the end of that day she’d quit. Because she’d felt bad and also because of what she thought might happen. Which did happen. A few days after the incident, the woman who managed the place called her and asked, “What went on between you and that big gavone?” The guy had come in asking for her; they’d told him she’d left so he’d picked another girl and gone into a room with her. They immediately came back out, the man holding the woman in front of him with a knife at her throat. “Tell me where that bitch is,” he said, “or I’ll cut this bitch.” They were able to talk him down, and no one got hurt but—

“Look,” the driver said. “The moon.” They’d emerged from the tunnel and before them shone a luminous, nearly full moon. “It’s a gibbous moon,” he said. “I think.”

“How do you know?”

“You’re surprised I know?”

“Well, most people don’t. I don’t.”

“I don’t know for sure. But my son got into astronomy when he was in, like, fifth grade? I even got him a telescope.” He pointed out the windshield. “That looks waxing gibbous to me.”

They rode in silence for some blocks.

Looking at the moon, she said, “It’s like we’re in a garden.”

“Yeah.”

A strange night garden of worn buildings that gave the impression that they were falling down even as they stood erect. There were hoary restaurants hawking faux comfort, fancy shops under crude metal shutters, narrow doorways sheltering ragged heaps of person, blunt neon (“DELI,” “GROCERY”) filling the windows of tiny twenty-four-hour shops, refrigerated cases of bright-colored cans behind blurred-glass doors, blurred humans walking out, clutching bags of emergency junk food.

She turned away and pored through her phone, looking at texts from her husband and messages about the gathering the next day, her pictures of Carley as a happy wife, a proud mom, a proud survivor, brave and joyful in her yard full of flowers. Carley young and bold, her large, lambent eyes lined with black, her dark hair still lush and animal-thick, her full lips set in an expression of stubborn will. Years after she’d left New York while Carley stayed, Carley used to call her drunk and cry about what a failure she was, how she’d never fully been herself, so no wonder she’d never fulfilled her potential as a fiction writer. “I have all these clothes and shoes I spent so much money on! And I never wore them even once!” she wailed. It was idiotic, spoiled, yet, in some strange way, it rang true. That strength of will so visible in her young face—she was probably right that it had never found authentic expression.

The car stopped. “This it?” the driver asked. Dazedly, she tapped her credit card to pay the fare and climbed from the car as he retrieved her bag and night traffic susurrated past. “It was nice talking,” he said and, with forthright eyes, put out his hand. Surprised, she took it, held it firmly, and said “Yes” and “Take care.”

He drove away thinking, Interesting lady, and then, Why did I talk to her so much? It was as if he’d wanted to explain himself, but why? He’d barely registered her looks, but her voice had pricked him in a way that he didn’t get. It was funny, sometimes, how you could react to a person you’d never see again. Probably it was just boredom: he was tired, she was his last fare, and now he could go home. He drove on autopilot, scanning disconnected thoughts—clean the litter box, refill the water bowl, the cat’s stiff tail with its little curl at the top (the cat belonged to his daughter; he had to call her in the morning), buy eggs, card game tomorrow, pay for his parking space—all the while more conscious than usual of the not-thoughts stirring underneath. There was a bad feeling there somewhere, trying to find him.

Brushing her teeth, she marvelled that she hadn’t thought about that incident for decades.

It was so like a man! No lonely woman would seek out a male prostitute and try to get him to be her boyfriend! It was a little contemptible, almost funny. But sad, too. He must have been in real pain. Maybe he’d wanted a date for a special occasion. Maybe he’d told his friends, “I met a girl, wait till you see her, she’s cute”—oh, God! The thought made her cover her heart with both hands. And the other girl, the girl he’d held the knife to. Because of her lie.

Why had he agreed to take care of the cat? The animal was nice enough, but it made a mess, and the place was already a mess. He’d put off the dishes, they’d piled up, and the toilet was going to hell. It was like the worse it got the harder it was to do anything about, and the cat box stinking up the whole room definitely made it worse. Still, he was happy that his daughter trusted him to care for the animal. He was glad that she was having a vacation (Grand Canyon, fiancé’s dime) before starting her new job (office manager in a dental office—excellent). He liked that she stood up for him to her brother, his son who barely talked to him now. His son was always a mama’s boy, ruined by her, thirty years old and still a spoiled baby, playing the boy-hero: If you talk about her like that again, Papa, I swear I’ll never come back here! He put his hands on the sink and braced himself, took a long look in the mirror. Lumpy McFatface—they’d called him that. His own father, even. Who treated his grandkids a thousand times better than he treated his own son.

When she called her husband, they talked about it; he assured her that it wasn’t her fault. She hadn’t made the guy do that. Of course she’d lied—what else could she have done? “Do you think you were afraid of him in the moment?” he asked. She said, “I don’t know,” but that wasn’t true. She hadn’t been afraid. She’d felt pity and misery and an impulse to make him feel better that she couldn’t follow through with.

Why was he even thinking about this? Because he’d told that woman about his son liking astronomy? Because he’d wanted her to know that he’d got the boy a telescope, that he was a good dad? Stupid! The cat watched him as he bent over to clean its box, awkwardly transferring its turds to a plastic bag. It followed him to the kitchen, happy for the same dry stuff it ate over and over. He poured the nuggets into the dish, poured himself a shot of amaro, drank it, poured another. He ought to repaint the cabinets, he thought. They looked dirty.

Why was everything looking dirty? He tried to focus on the good things: his wonderful daughter, the grandchildren he’d surely have soon, his friends, his house, even his son, who was doing well, though he wasn’t sure what exactly he was doing. Quietly, he said, “Forgive me, Jesus, for my negative thoughts. Allow Your healing hand to heal me. Touch my soul, touch my mind with Your wisdom. Jesus, You are Lord. Amen.” O.K., better.

He carried the shot into the bedroom, turned on his sleep movie with the sound off; even though he couldn’t hear it, the beautiful theme music rippled in his brain. His thoughts calmed and fell into soft pieces. He took off his clothes, neatly folding the shirt and pants. He drank the shot and swallowed his piss-no-more pill. He got comfortable in the bed and turned off the light. The familiar movie images bathed him: Dr. Z touches a window covered by frost crystals that turn into daffodils, a field of them. Birch trees, a cabin. Smiling, Dr. Z looks around, remembering. Inside a daffodil, a beautiful woman appears. . . . It was schlock but it worked. His eyes glazed and gradually closed as the dark not-thoughts rolled over him again.

There had been something else she could do. Other than lie. There was always something else you could do. Why had she been in that situation to start with? There was need, yes; the city was so expensive, and sometimes she could barely make the rent. Carley was in the same position, poor Carley calling from a pay phone after she’d been fired from yet another typing job, saying, “I’m going to have to do it again—can you go with me?”

But it wasn’t just about need; there was a kind of defiance, too. The idea—no, the feeling—that you could do what you’d always been told was the most shameful and despised thing, and you could do it in your own way, you could acknowledge the despised thing, love it; you could make it beautiful, even. It was yours, after all, to do what you wanted with. You, and not some fucked-up society, got to say what it was. A song from that time blared in her head:

We can’t afford to be innocent.
Stand up and face the enemy

A ballad of feminine defiance with an unmistakable strand of defeat folded in, a strand that somehow made it more powerful. “We will be invincible!” A dumb song, a fun song. What a weird time. She thought of that big angry boy; she thought of the woman he had threatened with a knife. She thought, I’m sorry, then got into bed.

A woman walks away from him, proud and snooty. Who is she? Not his wife. His wife is crying in the corner, collapsed on the floor, drunk and bleeding from her nose and mouth. He wants to comfort her, but his son blocks the way, only six but somehow huge. This makes it look like he is the bad guy, but he didn’t mean to do it. He begs them to understand and to help him, but the bitch keeps walking away, swinging her snooty ass. She’s the one who made this happen. She made him need something that he could never have. She treated him like a piece of garbage. He wants to kill her, smash her face until it’s a pulp of flesh and bone. But he can’t get at her, so he grabs another bitch, some poor random whore who’s just standing there. He beats her, though he doesn’t want to. She sobs and pleads, and he says, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” but he can’t stop. There is a surge of music, as if this were a show where the same thing always has to happen.

Rage and confusion like twin demons shoved him from sleep. Heart hammering, bladder bursting, he sat up. Something shameful felt very near, almost on top of him. And the piss-prevention pill wasn’t working; half awake, he stumbled out of bed and went to relieve himself. That was better. Still, when the cat rubbed on him, he wanted to grab it and throw it against the wall; as if it knew, it moved away. What was going on? Still standing there, he prayed, “My God, I am sorry for having offended Thee, and I detest all of my sins because of Thy just punishments, but most of all . . .” He was too agitated to continue. He went back to bed and focussed on the screen. Well, this was actually a little funny. It was the part where Dr. Z gimps after Lara as she walks down the street. He is hobbled by his sick heart, and she is too far away; he can’t walk properly or make himself heard. She just keeps going, her back perfectly straight. Dr. Z’s face twists in pain; he collapses and dies of love. People come running.

He sighed and turned the thing off. Maybe he’d dreamed about the woman walking away because he’d unconsciously known this part of the movie was coming up? He tried again: “I detest all of my sins because of Thy just punishments but most of all because they offend Thee, my God, who is all good and deserving of my love.” He sat for a moment, breathing more evenly. The subway ran in the distance. He said, “From my heart, I am sorry I hurt her. I’m sorry for anyone I hurt. Please, Lord, forgive me.” He did not understand his urge to pray. It was only a dream. Still, he felt relief. “I firmly resolve with the help of Your grace to sin no more and to avoid the near occasion of sin.” Which, amen, would be easy now. He was old and didn’t feel the needs of the body in the way he used to. Or of the heart. Which was sad, but maybe for the best. Calmed, he lay down and covered himself. The cat jumped up onto the bed and lay with him. Eventually, he returned to sleep. ♦

It didn’t take long for the flattery to begin. On Thursday, the Board of Peace, an entity set up by President Donald Trump, held its first formal meeting, in Washington, D.C., at the newly rebranded Donald J. Trump Institute of Peace. At the event, Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, the President of Kazakhstan, proposed that the board administer “a special President Trump award,” to recognize its namesake’s “outstanding peace-building efforts and achievements.”

If the moment felt too on the nose, too fawning and obsequious, no one seemed to bat an eye; Tokayev was just one of numerous foreign dignitaries and U.S. officials to heap praise upon Trump at the event. Also in the room was Gianni Infantino, the head of FIFA, soccer’s global governing body and facilitator of the World Cup, who, in December, had awarded Trump with the newly manufactured FIFA Peace Prize, during a ceremony at the nearby Kennedy Center, which Trump, for good measure, has also rebranded with his name.

The Board of Peace’s meeting focussed on collective efforts to stabilize and rebuild war-blighted Gaza, but Trump’s need to be at the heart of it all cast a shadow over the proceedings. He kicked off the meeting with a customarily rambling speech, rattling off his myriad peace initiatives and imagined diplomatic triumphs, even while floating the prospect of imminent war with Iran. The Administration has amassed military assets in the region at a scale that suggests the possibility of a sustained offensive campaign. “You’re going to be finding out over the next probably ten days,” Trump said, as several heads of state and top diplomats from countries in Iran’s neighborhood sat in grim silence.

A lot remains confusing and uncertain about the Board of Peace. Thursday’s event produced apparent pledges of about seven billion dollars from nine countries for the reconstruction of Gaza while Trump has separately suggested that the U.S. would muster ten billion dollars on its own for the board, though it was unclear where that money was coming from and whether it would pass congressional scrutiny. There were also offers of thousands of military personnel from countries including Indonesia and Morocco to compose an “international stabilization force” to police the territory. And yet details are sketchy on where such a force would be deployed and how all the money earmarked for it will be tracked and disbursed. A video presentation shown at the meeting touted A.I.-generated images of skyscrapers and luxury beach resorts in Gaza and proffered airy visions of the enclave turning into an “Abrahamic gateway,” a hub for trade networks that would span Europe and India and thread together the Middle East. Less was said about the bleak facts on the ground in Gaza, where Hamas refuses to fully disarm, humanitarian organizations are being denied access by Israel, and civilians languish in limbo, as well as unresolved political questions surrounding the conflict, including the fading prospects of a viable, independent Palestinian state. Among the officials at the Board of Peace meeting, mentions of the need for a two-state solution were scarce.

In November, the United Nations Security Council endorsed a U.S.-backed resolution that authorized the creation of the international force and gave its blessing to the Board of Peace’s stated mandate to aid in Gaza’s redevelopment. But, when the board’s charter emerged, it did not include a word about Gaza. Instead, analysts and diplomats see a far more ambitious project in motion: that Trump is seeking to create an entity that only he controls and which can supplant the work of the Security Council—or, as the board’s charter itself puts it, “depart from approaches and institutions that have too often failed.”

This is the “world order Trump prefers,” Phil Gordon, a former White House coördinator for the Middle East in the Obama Administration and former national-security adviser to Vice-President Kamala Harris, told me. “It’s not a genuinely multilateral one where others have a say, or the United States is constrained,” he said, but one where “the United States, and Trump personally, is at the center of everything.”

On Thursday, Trump outlined his more expansive desires, suggesting that the board could “take it a step further” to deal with other “hot spots” around the world. The faltering U.N., he said, would be brought “back to health.” It was a curious statement, given Trump’s hostility toward the U.N.—in the space of a year, his Administration has pulled the U.S. out of dozens of U.N. or U.N.-linked agencies, and the U.S. still owes the cash-strapped U.N. close to four billion dollars in outstanding dues. That shortfall is one of the reasons for a punishing wave of austerity currently ripping through the U.N. system.

Yet the U.N. provides an obvious reference for the Board of Peace. The board’s chintzy logo is a barely disguised facsimile of the U.N.’s emblem—the sombre olive wreath of peace has been turned into gilded clip art, and the U.N.’s insignia depicting a world map has been shrunk to what looks like MAGA’s imagined sphere of influence, showing North America, the northern rump of Latin America, and, yes, Greenland. Apart from the United States, only one other founding board member, El Salvador, is included in the territory covered in the logo. Gaza—for whose governance and reconstruction the board was established—is nowhere in view.

The Board of Peace was soft-launched, in January, in Davos, Switzerland, when the organizers of the World Economic Forum yielded their platform to the White House for a gaudy opening ceremony. Trump sat center stage as Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt, and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner took turns lavishing the President with praise for his contributions to global peace, as attendees did again on Thursday. Then a couple dozen world leaders and ministerial-level dignitaries joined Trump, standing around him as he signed the board’s founding charter, which enshrines Trump as an individual—not just as the President of the United States—as the board’s chairman in perpetuity.

The current membership of the board is a motley mix. It includes prominent countries already invested in bringing stability to Gaza—Turkey, Egypt, Jordan, the Gulf monarchies. The White House has also roped in governments involved in other alleged Trump-led peace initiatives, such as those of Armenia, Azerbaijan, Pakistan, and Kosovo. Governments of participating countries such as Vietnam, Cambodia, Kazakhstan, and Indonesia may see membership as a low-stakes way to boost their geopolitical clout. And then there are Trump’s fellow-travellers who have no obvious skin in the game beyond a desire to gratify the President, such as Argentina’s President, Javier Milei, a libertarian firebrand, and the Hungarian Prime Minister, Viktor Orbán, Europe’s most prominent illiberal nationalist.

Trump dispatched invitations to dozens of countries to join the Board of Peace, but he has been mostly rebuffed or kept at arm’s length by the U.S.’s traditional allies. European skepticism only deepened after Trump sought to include Russia and Belarus in the project. (Russia has yet to announce its decision, whereas Belarus agreed, though Belarusian officials said they did not receive visas from the U.S. to attend the meeting on Thursday.) In January, the French President, Emmanuel Macron, and his Brazilian counterpart, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, issued a joint call for the defense and strengthening of the U.N. in the face of Trump’s enterprise. Pope Leo XIV made a similar pitch for the U.N. in declining Trump’s invitation.

Sitting in the room during the meeting on Thursday, a European official in attendance was bemused by the succession of leaders voicing their admiration for Trump, especially after a number of top European politicians have been mocked for their own attempts to ingratiate themselves with the U.S. President over the past year. “One cannot only blame Europeans flattering you-know-who,” the official told me. “We’re not even the worst ones.”

Board-membership terms last three years (conveniently running out just as Trump’s term does). A government can pay a billion dollars for a permanent seat, but it’s unclear to most diplomats whether this experiment will exist or matter beyond Trump’s time in office. Two Presidents I spoke to in the aftermath of the Davos ceremony downplayed any expectation of financial contributions or commitments. The President of Kosovo, Vjosa Osmani, instead cast her small nation’s participation as an act of historical redemption, thanking Washington for its leading role in Kosovo’s struggle for independence from Serbia. “It was the helping hand of the United States of America that came to our rescue,” she told me. “Now, twenty-six years later, we are giving back and we are helping carry that peace forward.”

The Armenian President, Vahagn Khachaturyan, told me that he hoped that the board could help “enhance confidence” in the U.N. system by boosting peacemaking efforts. He lamented that “principles of coexistence are very often violated, and the United Nations is not often able to prevent those violations,” gesturing to the perennial problem of the Security Council, where one of the five veto-wielding powers—in recent history, chiefly Russia and the U.S.—can block significant resolutions to address conflicts such as Russia’s war in Ukraine or Israel’s war in Gaza.

But Trump and his lieutenants rarely speak of principles and seem far more interested in establishing an arena where only the U.S.’s veto counts. You could hear their ideological animus this past weekend, at a major security conference in Munich. Elbridge Colby, the U.S. under-secretary of defense for policy, scoffed at the “hosannas and shibboleths” that constitute talk of shared values and paeans to the rules-based order. Rubio poured scorn on the U.N., saying that “on the most pressing matters before us, it has no answers and has played virtually no role.”

Thant Myint-U, a Burmese-British historian whose grandfather U Thant was the U.N.’s third Secretary-General, said that, “despite all of its failings,” the U.N. “has been a big part of eighty years of unparalleled peace and prosperity in human history.” He warned that if the Board of Peace picks up momentum, it may “set the stage for a much broader collapse of the whole U.N. architecture that we’ve had since 1945.”

There’s plenty of reason to believe that the board may not be much more than a Trump vanity project of dissonant parts and vague goals that will fade from view amid the rolling dramas of his Presidency. But, as the U.S. plays spoiler within an international system in which it was once the linchpin, no other world power seems especially eager to pick up the slack. Thant Myint-U said, “At a time when Washington is challenging the very fundamentals of the U.N., both through the Board of Peace but also through aid cuts and funding cuts and everything else, no other country is saying, We’re either going to make up financially for the missing U.S. contributions, or we’re going to really invest politically in renewing and strengthening the U.N.”

By the sheer fact that the White House is staking so much on the Board of Peace’s success—Trump told his counterparts on Thursday that it could be “the most important day of our careers”—the board may actually have legs. Phil Gordon, the former national-security adviser to Harris, said, “As absurd as it is, it’s also the only game in town.”

This doesn’t bode well for the U.N., or for Gaza, where the Board of Peace’s role remains vague. Figures including the former British Prime Minister Tony Blair hold key positions of authority on the board, but no Palestinian official sits on the top executive rungs of its organizational structure, a fact that led Pierbattista Pizzaballa, the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, to dismiss the whole enterprise as “a colonialist operation.” A U.S.- and Israeli-vetted Palestinian technocratic committee has been set up, but its head, Ali Shaath, was visibly sidelined during Thursday’s meeting and appears to have been working thus far from Cairo. Meanwhile, Gaza is carved up into one zone under Israeli military control and one where Hamas still holds sway; the bulk of Gaza’s population lives in the latter and is often hit by periodic Israeli strikes on alleged Hamas targets. Hundreds of Palestinians have died since the formal ceasefire was clinched, in October.

On Thursday, U.S. and Israeli officials insisted that Hamas’s full disarmament was a prerequisite to any further progress. But the militant group is unwilling to engage in a complete surrender and abandonment of its self-styled “resistance” mission while Israeli forces remain in Gaza and while rival armed factions, some backed by Israel, gain ground in a territory flush with small arms. Michael Hanna, a Middle East expert and the U.S. program director at the International Crisis Group, said, “There just hasn’t been the kind of pragmatic diplomacy to try to see if there’s a way forward on this issue.”

Daniel Shapiro, a former U.S. Ambassador to Israel and a distinguished fellow at the Atlantic Council, argued that the Israelis, for their part, likely expect the Board of Peace to fail, not least because “they are very skeptical that anyone will disarm Hamas, other than them”—something that would “require a very significant and quite destructive military operation.” That potential explosion of violence may also play on the minds of wealthy Arab donors whom Trump has lined up to bankroll the Board of Peace’s efforts, but who may end up reneging. “Unless Hamas is disarmed, there is every reason to think there will be another round of this conflict, and most of the donors are not going to actually pay to reconstruct Gaza just to have it be destroyed again,” Shapiro said.

Israel can live with the status quo, but Palestinians in Gaza cannot. Hanna told me that if things stay “in this unreconstructed state, then it’s a slow-bleed displacement that happens.” He warned, “In the face of a kind of stark reality where Gazan society has been razed to the ground, people eventually will vote with their feet.” ♦

It’s a standard trope in portrayals of assimilated Jews to open with a scene built around a Christmas tree. That’s how Tom Stoppard’s “Leopoldstadt” and Alfred Uhry’s “Last Night of Ballyhoo” begin, and also Ian Buruma’s memoir about his grandparents, “Their Promised Land.” The idea is, as soon as you show that, you’ve got the audience’s full attention, especially if it’s a Jewish audience, because it’s so peculiar.

When I was growing up, the idea that it was peculiar wouldn’t have occurred to me—­all the Jews in New Orleans, at least the ones we knew, celebrated Christmas, though our family did so a little more enthusiastically than the others. Weeks in advance, we would choose our tree, haul carefully preserved boxes of beautiful and fragile ornaments out of the attic, summon an attitude of mixed reverence and joy for trimming the tree, and place wreaths and other decorations around the house.

On Christmas Eve, we would sing the standard carols and my father would solemnly read out loud Clement Clarke Moore’s poem “A Visit from St. Nicholas.” On Christmas morning my sister and I would arise at dawn and sit impatiently in front of the tree, waiting to open dozens of presents that had come in from across the Lemann family’s expanse of relatives, friends, and law-firm clients. Once or twice, Father went to a good deal of effort to arrange to have a grandly presented roast suckling pig, with a small apple stuffed in its mouth for decoration, which is about the most unkosher dish imaginable, as the main course at our Christmas dinner.

As I got older, I began to have a sense that there was a different American Jewish life out there somewhere. Father’s taste in reading in those years ran to Trollope, Thackeray, and Walter Scott, but my mother had novels by Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, and Bernard Malamud on her bedstand, and I would sometimes look at these when nobody was around. Or, though it was rare in those days, there would be a television show or a movie with a character you were meant to read as Jewish, who looked and spoke like nobody we knew in New Orleans.

I can’t remember Israel ever being mentioned in our house, including during the 1967 war that commanded the full attention of most American Jews. Is it possible that the Holocaust was never mentioned, either? It seems hard to believe, but that’s the way I remember it. When something utterly, horrifyingly upends your view of the world and your place in it, you have the choice of simply shutting out the destabilizing new information. Once, when I was attending Sunday school at our Reform temple, a teacher showed us “Night and Fog,” Alain Resnais’s short documentary film about Nazi concentration camps, which was released in 1956 and contained a few of the now familiar images of stacked-­up corpses and skeletal survivors. She was shocked that, as far as she could tell, none of us in the class had been told there had been concentration camps, and not so many years earlier.

I can see that one might read this and ask, Why not just convert? Part of the answer is that in New Orleans, at least our New Orleans, everybody knew everybody else, going back for at least two generations. There wouldn’t have been any point to our pretending not to be Jewish, because everybody thought of us as Jewish and that would never change.

Beyond that, we were conspicuously different from most people we knew in New Orleans in ways that comported with what Jews were thought to be like. We had rooms full of books in our house, we had more money, we had modern art instead of hunting prints on the walls, we didn’t drink much by New Orleans standards. What Father wanted was for being Jewish to mean what he remembered it as meaning when he was growing up, in the days when the Reform movement’s universalism, embodied in its founding document, the Pittsburgh Platform of 1885, was in full flower—before the Holocaust, before Eastern European Jews had become dominant in American Jewish culture. He wanted it to be elegant, comfortable in the wider world (especially the upper-­class world), not too conspicuous. Long after I’d left home, he’d question me, in his characteristic tone of mock outrage, about a wide variety of Jewish customs and practices that over the years became part of my adult life. Why did Jews wear “headgear”? Why did they wear prayer shawls? Why did they eat smoked salmon, when everybody knows that’s Scottish, not Jewish? All these, at heart, were variants of the same question: Why couldn’t things still be the way they were at Temple Sinai, a grand edifice on St. Charles Avenue, in the nineteen-thirties?

The fierceness with which he clung to these preferences was a standard, long-running German Jewish response to a new wave of Jewish exclusion, which began in the United States in the late nineteenth century and lasted for many decades. Back in 1879, a relative of mine named Lazard Kahn, an immigrant from Alsace who was a rising businessman, wrote a letter to Thomas Nast, the famous cartoonist for Harper’s Weekly. “My esteemed sir,” he began, in a strong, assertively calligraphed hand, and went on to suggest that Nast turn his satirical and moralizing attention to some recent highly publicized incidents in which Jews had been denied admission to fashionable hotels in New York. The best known of them had one of the leading German ­Jewish bankers, Joseph Seligman, turning up in 1877 at the elegant Grand Union Hotel in Saratoga Springs, New York, and being told that henceforth no Jews could stay there. Other hotels soon followed suit. So did high-­society subdivisions, resorts, apartment buildings, and clubs—­and, even more consequentially, prestigious employers like banks, industrial corporations, law firms, universities, museums, and publishing houses. Thomas Nast did not produce a cartoon; indeed, a few years earlier, during the 1873 financial panic, Harper’s Weekly had published a cartoon that showed Jewish-looking bankers profiting from the crisis.

In New York, the leading German Jews did not react to the Grand Union Hotel incident by appealing to the humanitarian impulses of Gentiles, in the manner of Lazard Kahn’s letter to Nast. Instead, many of them came to see their new and unexpected troubles as the result of the mass emigration of Eastern European Jews which was just getting under way. Before 1880, there were fewer than three hundred thousand Jews in the United States, most of them German. By 1920, as many as three million Jews had arrived, overwhelmingly from Eastern Europe. They weren’t just far more numerous than the German Jews, they were more observant, more concentrated in urban slums, and much poorer. The way to combat anti-Jewish prejudice, many German Jews thought, would be to do something about them.

In 1891, three prominent German Jews—­a Schiff, a Seligman, and a Straus—­asked President Benjamin Harrison to pressure the tsar to adopt more lenient policies toward the Jews, and to stanch the rising incidence of pogroms, so that Russian Jews wouldn’t feel they had to immigrate to the United States. Another German ­Jewish project was the Galveston Plan (1907-14), which aimed to steer Jewish immigrants away from New York and other big cities, where there were highly visible Jewish slums. A third initiative was establishing a Yiddish-­language newspaper called Die Yiddische Welt, or the Jewish World, as an alternative to the unmannerly homegrown press, much of which was scandalous and socialist, at least to the German Jews’ way of thinking. Still another was funding the early Jewish agricultural settlements in Palestine for Eastern European Jewish refugees, which would provide a destination that wasn’t New York.

Surely there was compassion in these efforts—­maybe even the enhanced compassion you would feel for people who were like you in some way. But it didn’t extend to actual mingling. As a son of the German Jewish financier Felix Warburg said about his father, who contributed or raised millions to the aid of Jews in distress, “He disliked almost everything about the Jews except their problems.”

In France in the late nineteenth century, a Jewish Army captain, Alfred Dreyfus, was put on trial on false charges of treason. Dreyfus’s sensational case turned him into a public enemy, and made it clear that France, the site of one of the earliest programs of Jewish emancipation, was not friendly to Jews, either. Theodor Herzl, the journalist who founded the modern Zionist movement, said he was converted by the Dreyfus case from a typically assimilated, secular Western European Jew into someone who believed that the time had come to declare the Diaspora a failure and create a Jewish nation. This did not appeal, to say the least, to German Jews in America. No idea was more threatening to our sub-tribe at the turn of the twentieth century than Zionism. We wanted to blend in, to be unobtrusive, to be accepted. Zionism was loud, insistent, separatist, tribal. Zionism called attention to the unsettling reality that millions of Jews in Europe wanted to leave—­many, no doubt, for America rather than for Palestine. Reform Judaism’s slogan was that we were a religion, not a race. Zionism was a secular movement rooted in Jewish identity: race, not religion.

Just as America’s carriage-trade institutions were systematically excluding Jews, the German Jews’ Reform institutions excluded or expelled Zionists. Kaufmann Kohler, a German-born Reform rabbi, became the president of the Reform movement’s Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati in 1903. He purged Zionists from its faculty; he also barred a prominent Zionist from speaking at H.U.C. In 1918, the Central Conference of American Rabbis, the national Reform leadership organization, issued a statement criticizing the Balfour Declaration, the British government’s official statement of support for a Jewish homeland in Palestine. “The ideal of the Jew is not the establishment of a Jewish state—not the re-assertion of Jewish nationality which has long been outgrown,” the statement said. A few years after that, Congress passed the Johnson-Reed Act, which severely restricted emigration from Southern and Eastern Europe (and barred immigrants from Asia). This meant that Jews would have a hard time coming to the U.S.; Jewish migration to Palestine swelled.

In 1936, Julian Feibelman arrived as the new rabbi at New Orleans’s Temple Sinai. He wound up holding the job for thirty-­one years, and so being the main direct religious authority of both Father’s childhood and mine. In 1938, he married one of the Lemanns, which also made him, to me, Cousin Julian. Julian had grown up in Jackson, Mississippi, when it was a town of around seven thousand people, without paved streets. His father, who, like most of the other Jews in town, owned a store, had the family eat matzos during Passover and take the day off on Yom Kippur, but that was the extent of their observance. They also celebrated Christmas and Easter as secular holidays.

Julian had minimal childhood religious education: he didn’t know any Hebrew until, after attending a Methodist college in Jackson, he entered Reform rabbinical school at H.U.C. He wound up spending the first ten years of his career as the No. 2 rabbi at a large, prosperous Reform temple in Philadelphia, where the services were on Sunday, where there was likely a choir and an organ rather than a cantor, and where the custom was that gentlemen should remove their hats when they were indoors, not put them on.

While he was in Philadelphia, Julian enrolled in graduate school in sociology at the University of Pennsylvania. He researched and wrote his Ph.D. dissertation after he had moved to Temple Sinai: “A Social and Economic Study of the New Orleans Jewish Community,” published in 1941. New Orleans, Julian reported, had fewer than two thousand Jewish families—relatively educated, secure, established, Reform. It had been spared the mass migration of Eastern European Jews, “which caused such congestion in New York City, overran the lower East-Side, and subsequently produced the social problems of the vicious sweat-­shops and tenements.” These Yiddish-speaking immigrants “brought with them the habits that long years of restriction and fear had inculcated.” More recently, Julian averred, New Orleans had spared itself another set of problems, because it was the destination of very few refugees from Nazi Germany.

There’s a capitalized headline breaking up the text of the dissertation: “Jews Are Not a Race.” Reading this today generates a full-­on emotional re-creation of the Jewish world I grew up in. Most Temple Sinai Jews were casual, wry, off-handed, unexcitable, and never overwrought, except when it came to anything obviously Jewish, in which case a high wall of absolute unacceptability went up. Standard-­issue Jewishness went against the way we had chosen to position ourselves. It raised the possibility that we might lose what we had.

The picture of the world and our place in it that we had constructed made it almost insuperably difficult to absorb, let alone confront, the destruction of the German Jews in Germany. It was like a violation of natural law: it required believing that what seemed impossible in Germany was possible; that an all-encompassing Jewish solidarity had become necessary; that Zionism might represent the only realistic future for many, even most, Jews.

Julian had family in Germany, including his much ­loved step-grandmother, and he had constant personal reminders of how desperate the situation there was. He’d get pleading letters from German Jews who were also named Feibelman, saying they were his relatives. Could he rescue them? (From 1938: “Dear Cousin: We are very disappointed and troubled of not yet having an answer to my letter that I have directed to you Oktober of the past year.” From 1941: “Please, Julian, try and try again, there is no time to lose anymore.”) “There was little I could do to help or bring comfort to them,” Julian wrote in a self-published memoir decades later; he surmised that many of the writers had probably just picked his name out of a phone book. If the larger implication of the individual cases was Zionism, he found that impossible, too. He firmly did not believe that establishing a Jewish state in Palestine would help the Jews. “I never wanted to see a nation,” he told an interviewer. “I don’t have any faith in nationalism whatsoever, whether it’s Jewish, German, Russian, Chinese, or what.”

Word was beginning to leak out about the Nazis’ plan to exterminate the Jews en masse. In the summer of 1942, a secretly anti-Nazi German businessman learned about the death camps; Heinrich Himmler had stopped by his mining company’s nearby villa, just after making an inspection tour of Auschwitz. The businessman told a Jewish banker in Switzerland what he’d heard. The news passed among the leadership of Jewish organizations. Gerhart Riegner, a representative of the World Jewish Congress, put it into the form of a telegram addressed to Stephen Wise, the head of that group, which reached Wise at the end of August. “Received alarming report stating that, in the Fuehrer’s Headquarters, a plan has been discussed, and is under consideration, according to which all Jews in countries occupied or controlled by Germany numbering 3 ½ to 4 millions should, after deportation and concentration in the East, be at one blow exterminated, in order to resolve, once and for all the Jewish question in Europe, ” the telegram read.

A formidable, proud man, zealously liberal and ardently Zionist, Wise had carefully maintained direct relationships with Franklin Roosevelt and members of his Administration. His relationship with Roosevelt was mainly confined to Jewish matters, which led to a particular version of the court Jew’s eternal dilemma: Do you press hard and risk losing access or be cautious and keep the doors open?

Wise, choosing to play the insider, gave the telegram to a high-ranking State Department official, who asked him to keep Riegner’s report confidential until he could investigate it independently. Finally, after three months, the State Department told Wise that it was true: the Nazis had a plan to murder three million or four million Jews through industrial processes that surpassed in pure purposeless cruelty anything the world had ever seen. There would be no government announcement of this, but Wise could speak of it himself. He held a press conference, which got only moderate public attention. One can retrospectively chastise Wise for not being more aggressive—­but, for contrast, there is Julian Feibelman’s reaction. About a week after Wise’s press conference, Julian devoted a column in the New Orleans Jewish Ledger to criticizing Wise, and not because he thought Wise hadn’t acted quickly enough. To Julian, Wise’s account was not plausible. Why would Germany, in the middle of a vast offensive against the Soviet Union, divert precious men and matériel to killing “poor and actually harmless Jews,” when that would not help them win the war? Also, Wise had said that one of the Nazis’ methods for killing Jews was to inject air bubbles into their veins, at the rate of up to a hundred people per hour, but a doctor in New Orleans told Julian that this was impossible. Who knew what other wild exaggerations Wise had chosen to believe?

It bothered Julian, too, that Wise had announced what he had heard directly, when it might have been more appropriate for the announcement to come from the State Department. Of course, the State Department hadn’t and wouldn’t make such an announcement, but anti-Zionist Reform Jews like Julian typically felt that Jews should not advocate on their own behalf, that the advocacy should come from others, who were more neutral. That way it wouldn’t enhance the perception that Jews are pushy, loud, and aggressive. Julian ended his editorial by asking, “Would it not have been far better for Dr. Wise to have refrained from adding his name to these accounts?”

Wrath quickly came down on Julian’s head—­first from a Zionist Reform rabbi in New York named Louis Newman, then from Wise himself. Both of these rabbis were already furious about the formation of the American Council for Judaism, an anti-Zionist organization that a group of German Jews, including Julian, had founded in 1942. Why, Newman wrote, would Julian choose to give the world reason to doubt that the horrors unfolding in Europe were actually happening? Why would he lend his voice in opposition to the efforts to find a place of refuge for whatever Jews were able to survive? Wise’s letter to Julian was even harsher: “I am sorry for you. I pity you. I consider your attitude disgraceful in every sense. Instead of lifting a finger to help your people, you traduce one who has sought to do everything within his strength in order to touch the conscience of the American people and to avert further Hitler crimes against his people.”

In the summer of 1943, less than a year after Wise’s press conference, a member of the Polish resistance named Jan Karski came to Washington to give the still evidently unbelieving American officialdom another report on the Holocaust, then in its peak period of factory killing. Karski had managed to visit the Warsaw ghetto and a transit stop for the Bełżec extermination camp. He then secured meetings with, among others, President Roosevelt and the Vienna-born Felix Frankfurter, whom Roosevelt had appointed to the Supreme Court in 1939. Nearly four decades later, during the filming of Claude Lanzmann’s film “Shoah,” Karski reënacted his meeting with Frankfurter. Karski rose from his seat to demonstrate how, after he had laid out his terrible story, Frankfurter declared, almost shouting, “I don’t believe you!” It’s a resonant moment in the film—­but what did Frankfurter mean? Karski’s idea was that Frankfurter wasn’t reacting in the manner of Julian Feibelman, by questioning the facts. Instead, Frankfurter was saying that what he had heard went beyond the bounds of what he’d been able to consider possible, in a long life of crusading against injustices.

How could one live after learning this? Could it be put out of mind? After the war, Julian joined a delegation of American dignitaries on a trip to Europe that included a stop in Berlin. The city still lay in ruin, filled with piles of rubble and half-­destroyed buildings. These conditions shocked and horrified him; he thought the United States should not have demanded an unconditional surrender from the Nazis, so that the war might have ended earlier and with less destruction. Just before he left, he stopped by the office of the Joint Distribution Committee, an organization devoted to helping Jewish refugees, to ask whether there was any news about his step-grandmother and his cousins, from whom he had heard nothing in years. As he told the story, the people in the office promised to try to find them. It would have been possible, I suppose, for Julian to pursue his search for his missing relatives more doggedly, but he hadn’t chosen to do that during the war, either. He never heard back from the Joint Distribution Committee. He returned to New Orleans and resumed his old life at Temple Sinai. With the establishment of the state of Israel, in 1948, he resigned from the American Council for Judaism, though without endorsing Zionism.

I grew up in the penumbra of the American Council for Judaism. Father was not a member, but he shared its perspective, and I didn’t encounter Zionism when I was growing up. It was only when I left New Orleans that I realized how profoundly different, in fact opposite, the Council’s views were to what most American Jews believed. To some leaders of the Council, President Harry Truman’s early recognition of the Jewish state in 1948 was not a great human-rights advance but a cynical gambit to pander to a bloc of voters and improve his chance of being reëlected in 1948. The capture of Adolf Eichmann, one of the architects of the Holocaust, by Israeli intelligence agents in Argentina in 1960, and his subsequent public war-crimes trial in Jerusalem, which most Jewish Americans cheered, was to the Council’s executive director, an energetic Reform rabbi named Elmer Berger, a disaster, legally indefensible, because Israel didn’t have the right to snatch people who lived in other sovereign nations and put them on trial for violating laws that hadn’t existed at the time.

When American Jews—many of whom, by the postwar decades, were prosperously middle class—began to expand the network of Jewish summer camps and day schools, the Council tried to launch a campaign of resistance, because it saw these institutions as examples of Jewish self-­segregation. When Jewish aid organizations launched campaigns to help Jews in Romania and the Soviet Union immigrate to Israel—­another popular cause throughout Jewish America—the Council saw it as just a self-interested financial scheme, insisting that actually those Jews had no interest in going to the Middle East. In 1958, Leon Uris, the son of Eastern European Jewish immigrants, published “Exodus,” his sentimental best-seller celebrating the birth of Israel. As the film adaptation was set to be released, the Council reached out to movie critics. It praised the director, Otto Preminger, for clearing up the book’s “obvious historical distortions and anti-Arab propaganda,” but still cautioned reviewers about the film’s glorification of the Jewish state. The central concern that pushed the Council to do all this was not primarily Palestinian rights—­in those days, the word Palestinian was not in its vocabulary—­but changes its leaders found alarming in the way American Jews chose to define themselves. They had to be persuaded to resist the tribal impulse.

Father left enough material behind for me to trace how he individually arrived at the version of Jewishness I remember from my childhood. He graduated from high school in 1943, enrolled at Harvard, and then enlisted. During basic training he was given a standardized mental test. The result—probably a high math score—got him assigned to the Signal Corps, the part of the Army in charge of communications. He spent most of his time in the service at a base in the Philippines, encoding outgoing messages.

The most dutiful of sons, Father wrote many long letters to his parents, some of which arrived scissored into scraps by military censors. In one that caught my attention, he told them about a friendship he’d struck up with Herman Weintraub, “a Brooklyn Jew who is thirty but looks fortyfive.” In “The Last Night of Ballyhoo,” set in Atlanta in 1939, the action revolves around the appearance of Joe Farkas, also a Brooklyn Jew, whose presence in a German Jewish Southern milieu causes intense anxiety. Father was raised to react that way, but now, in 1946, he was surprised to find that he might feel differently.

Herman acted as a kind of older brother to Father, which he appreciated; Father wasn’t used to being around people who came from a wide range of backgrounds, and Herman was. On the other hand, Father knew more about culture than Herman did. He lent Herman his copy of Theodore Dreiser’s “Sister Carrie” (“a beautiful book Tom, a beautiful book”). They discussed Mozart. The pleasure that Herman took in these things was moving to Father. In the end, though, Herman was too far outside Father’s known world for him to allow their relationship to go past a certain point: “I know his kind,” he wrote his parents. “He’ll never amount to anything, inspite of his sensitivities and worthwhile ideas, but he has a warm and generous nature and would be a good friend.”

For Father, the standard way of being Jewish in America (including the standard relation to Zionism) was, simply put, too Jewish, requiring incessantly reminding the world of our disruptive presence as a distinctive people. Fortunately, by his lights, another path was available, the one he and my mother chose, in which you’d persuade yourself that all the main sources of oppression of the Jews over the centuries—­religion, nationalism, ethnicity—­would now finally yield to modernity and rationality, thanks to advances in science and a collective determination never to relive the horrors of the war. Why should we cling to the superstitions and the tribal loyalties of the past, when they were on the way out?

As he entered middle age, Father—by now a partner in a family law firm in New Orleans—took on the project, to be carried out with exquisite delicacy, of getting admitted into New Orleans’s highest social rank. His sponsor in this effort was George Montgomery, a childhood friend of his who, as much as anyone, was the master arbiter of New Orleans high society. At Father’s fiftieth-birthday party, a black-­tie dinner held at our house in 1976, with servants in uniform passing out heavy-­duty drinks, George stood up and said, with tears in his eyes (and Father’s, too), “The most Christian man I know is a Jew, Tommy Lemann.”

The absolute security that George felt about his own social position, plus some liberal impulse stirring within him, led him to want to take down the barriers that the Mardi Gras krewes—social organizations of immense prestige—had erected against Jews, at least on behalf of the Lemanns. One year George arranged for Father and Mother to be invited to one of the leading Mardi Gras balls, that of the Atlanteans. Afterward Mother gave me a report. The members of Atlanteans (all male) were masked. Their wives and female guests were not. They sat in a special section until they were invited to dance with the members. What did everybody think about the Lemanns being there? It was hard for Mother to tell, because of the masks. The men who had asked Mother to dance were obviously the ones who approved, but they were not supposed to identify themselves to her. Who were they? She could only guess. And how had Father and Mother done? Had they slipped up and acted in some way that could have been construed as Jewish, which is to say, unacceptable? I don’t know, but that evening seems to have brought Father’s Mardi Gras ambitions to a close. I don’t remember their setting off for any balls again.

It now looks to me as if no matter how hard Father tried, somehow, at least in the eyes of others, our Jewishness kept reasserting itself. The most obvious ways were through the social antisemitism of the clubs and krewes, or the occasional taunts that would be directed at me at the Country Day School: someone would roll a penny up the aisle past my desk, to demonstrate that, as a Jew, I loved money too much to be able to resist pouncing on it. I had a friend at Country Day whose parents were divorced, which was rare in that time and place. His father had moved away, and none of us had ever met him. His mother remarried, and his stepfather—­one of us, a German Jew—­eventually began legal proceedings to adopt his stepsons formally, which would entail changing their last name from Wilson to Rosenthal. My friend’s father turned up in court and gave him a lecture about how he didn’t want to go through life with a Jewish last name. He was young—he had no idea of how much would be closed off to him. Think of the jobs you wouldn’t get, the clubs you couldn’t join.

These glimpses indicated that there was a conversation about us going on out of our sight and hearing. What was it like? Who among the people we knew spoke about us as vulgar or greedy or strange, and how exactly did they put it? I think of Mother and Father as yearning for a comfortableness that people on the other side of the American Jewish cultural divide, the less assimilated side, could acquire through life in a Jewish community, but which was unavailable to my parents because of the path they had chosen. Their house, a large modern structure that they had built in the nineteen-sixties, had two libraries, a public one for entertaining guests and a private one for themselves. Their large collection of Jewish books was kept in the private one.

By the time that I was in my twenties and living on the East Coast, I felt a distinct tug in the direction of Jewishness. I didn’t know what to do about it, but it was there, not to be denied. Anything that was demonstrably Jewish—­a book, a movie, a restaurant—­drew my interest. Anything that was anti-­Jewish—­a story about exclusion, an obstacle that hadn’t come down, a disapproving enumeration of supposedly Jewish traits—­was possibly more fascinating. But then what? Once or twice, I wandered into a synagogue for services on the Jewish holidays, but I felt completely lost, self-conscious. People would say prayers in Hebrew and Aramaic which I didn’t understand, sing tunes I’d never heard, stand up and sit down according to rules that everybody but me seemed to know. All I had really learned, at that point, was how to conform to the broad outlines of being culturally Jewish. What did that amount to? It was at best shallow, merely a stance that didn’t entail any real commitment, and at worst a false front.

When Alex, my oldest child, was born, a friend who wasn’t Jewish suggested that he not be circumcised. I suppose that it seemed to him to be a barbaric and outdated practice, one that entailed inflicting pain on an innocent newborn. Hearing the suggestion, I was nearly knocked over by an overwhelming wave of resistance that I hadn’t expected. No! Surely I hadn’t had such a visceral reaction because I consciously felt committed to God’s covenant with Abraham; at that point I don’t think I’d ever even read that passage in the Torah. Still, some powerful feeling of peoplehood, of a commandment being violated, swept over me. Not long afterward, we moved to Pelham, a town just outside New York City, to raise Alex and his brother Theo, four years younger, and I made a point of joining the small and relatively new synagogue there, the Pelham Jewish Center. (Much of the housing in New York’s suburbs had previously been “restricted”; the older members of the synagogue had stories about the difficulties they had encountered in getting the local officials’ permission to buy an old house and convert it.)

As the years passed, I’d go to the synagogue sometimes for a Saturday-morning service. At a crucial point, the ark would be opened, everyone would stand, the Torah scroll would be brought out, and someone would walk it around the room so that everyone could symbolically kiss it: a quick touch of the prayer book or the fringe of the tallis, first to the scroll, then to the lips. After this display of reverence, the scroll would be laid down on a podium and opened, and the rabbi would read that week’s portion aloud in a special intonation. At a bar mitzvah, it would be the spindly child, dressed up more fancily than on any previous occasion, who would be called up and handed the staggeringly heavy Torah scroll. Before beginning the procession around the room, the child would intone the essential Jewish prayer, the Shema. And at that point, I would burst into helpless tears, struggling to keep it quiet enough not to be noticed.

What was happening—­why the dramatic effect? Access to this aspect of Jewish life, of the life of my family going back hundreds of years, had been shut off to me, as firmly as a metal door welded shut. That must have upset me a great deal, even though I wasn’t consciously aware of being upset about it. Now the door was open—­whoosh. I was weeping over how liberating it felt to permit myself the luxury of particularism, of membership in a People. Over surrender to the undeniable power of ancient, prerational wisdom. Over the poignancy of my parents’ doomed hope that other doors would open if they closed this one. ♦

This is drawn from “Returning: A Search for Home Across Three Centuries.”